Mt. Greylock Residency Sunday October 13, 2024 dawn to dusk poetry reading 4pm
On Sunday October 13, 2024, Brece Honeycutt will have a skyday artist residency at Bascom Lodge on Mt. Greylock.
Honeycutt continues to be fascinated by clouds and the ever-changing sky. Seconds compounded into minutes often bring quick sky changes. Contrasted with lingering, long lasting blues punctuated with wisps of white clouds. And yet, grey upon yellowgrey upon orangegrey into pinkgrey can be both grim and great, depending.
Whilst on top of Mt. Greylock, she will observe and translate onto paper with words and watercolor the skyday. At 4pm, she will read prose and poetry related to clouds, including poems from her forthcoming chapbook, pink grey blue sky cloud.
Thanks to Monika Sosnowski and Peter Dudek for inviting me to Bascom Lodge for a residency atop Mt. Greylock.
endangered species
recently, a friend reminded me of
a temporary art work I made for
“Clean Out Your Files Week”
materials:
gently used file folders
print shop off-cuts.
items destined for the dumpster
each folder acquired a new label,
a long strand of paper with either —
a bird, crustacea, fish, insect, spider,
mammal, mussel, snail, plant, reptile
.or amphibian—printed on it
endangered species names from
The National Geographic Society
Book, ‘The Company We Keep’
by Douglas H. Chadwick &Joel Sartore, 1995
Commissioned by The Department of
Environmental Services and Arlington
Cultural Affairs, Arlington County, VA.
The 1998 installation was in the lobby
of the Bozman Government Center.
And, when finished, all materials were
either reused or recycled.
Thanks to Angela Adams for inviting me
to be part of Clean Out Your Files Week.
[photos by Jason Horowitz]
is just blue, or azure sky blue?
red or scarlet poppy red?
pink or carnation pink?
In her 1898 book,
“The Use of Color in the Verse of
English Romantic Poets,” Alice Edwards Pratt
delves deep into the poets
“descriptive, discriminative, dramatic, aesthetic”
words of color
such as—
“pinky-silver’
“autumnal leaf like-red”
“purple-hectic”
“rose-ensanquined ivory”
and charts each poet’s color
by terms for--
“mountains and hills”
“sky, cloud and air”
“deep waters”
Happily I found Pratt whilst reading
Nicholas Gaskill’s essay, ‘Language and Psychology’
in the ‘A Cultural History of Color:
In the Age of Industry’
edited by Alexandra Loske.
.
this morning’s poetry prompt
from Heather McKay Young
pick a color & I chose
‘purple.violet.iris.mauve.’
on my morning walk,
I found myself on the purple trail
by happenstance
by coincidence
by necessity
by unknown choice
by poetry
2 years ago today, Copy Press launched
‘A Bird to overhear-‘ for their Becoming Fireflies series!
“Are we listening? Are you listening?
When did I start listening?
When’d di you first hear them? Do you recall which one?
Was it the dawn chorus? Or the wail, cry, caw at last light?
When did it dawn on you? Are you listening?
Can you name them? How many can you name?
According to the New York Times only 1 in 8 can
Name more than 20 species. Can you name their songs?Can you hear them? Can you see their flight patterns?
The landscape architect Gertrude Jekyll, once blind,
could name them by the sound of their wings in flight.”
-text excerpt from 'Listening" chapter | watch ‘A Bird to overhear-‘
I am forever grateful to Copy Press for their faith in my work. Thanks a million, Vit Hopley, Yve Lomax, Jono Lomax and Opel Morgen for this collaboration and all you did to make it happen.
'A Bird to overhear-' photography, filming/Brece Honeycutt; script, narrator/Brece Honeycutt; script editor/Vit Hopley; producer/Yve Lomax; video-editing, post production/Jono Lomax; graphics/Opal Morgen; thumbnail image/Brece Honeycutt
Large swathes of goldenrod grace the fields now and sway in the wind on this late summer day. We natural dyers long for this time of year when we can harvest the brilliant flowers that make an eye popping fluorescent yellow on cloth.
The Shakers dyed with many fall harvests—goldenrod, sumac, walnut—but didn’t wear yellow. Why I wonder didn’t they take advantage of these vast fields of bright flowers? Deborah Burns notes “goldenrod grows in neglected fields” and “where corn had once grown tall, goldenrod now replaced it.” A ‘neglected’ field did not exist on any Shaker farm, so, perhaps, the goldenrod was not as plentiful as it is now. I still search for the reason that Shakers didn’t wear yellow, but maybe it is as easy as yellow shows dirt more than a deep butternut cloth.
If you go to harvest goldenrod, you will not be the only one, for the pollinators are out in full force taking nectar and pollen from the goldenrod, making stores for the winter months.
I invite you to carry Mary Oliver’s fitting poem, Goldenrod, in your pocket as you seek pollinators amongst the fluorescent yellow inflorescences.
On roadsides, in fall fields, in rumpy bunches, Saffron and orange and pale gold,
in little towers, soft as mash, sneeze-bringers and seed-bearers, full of bees and yellow heads and perfect flowerlettes
and orange butterflies. I don’t suppose much notice comes of it, except for honey, and how it heartens the heart with its
blank blaze. I don’t suppose anything loves it except, perhaps, the rocky voids filled by its dumb dazzle.
For myself, I was just passing my, when the wind flared and the blossoms rustled, and the glittering pandemonium
leaned on me. I was just minding my own business when I found myself on their straw hillsides, citron and butter-colored,
and was happy, and why not? Are not the difficult labors of our lives full of dark hours? And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far,
that is better than these light-filled bodies? All day on their airy backbones they toss in the wind,
they bend as though it was natural and godly to bend,
they rise in a stiff sweetness,
in the pure peace of giving
one’s gold away.
Mary Oliver, Goldenrod fromNew and Selected Poems, 1992
Deborah E. Burns, Shaker Cities of Peace, Love and Union A History of Hancock Bishopric, (University Press of New England, 1993), pg. 190.
This past week, Sarah Margolis-Pineo, Curator at Hancock Shaker Village and I went on a field trip to meet our collaborator at Camphill Village for a tour. It wasn’t the astoundingly beautiful and plentiful herb garden or creative energy found in the neat stacks of bound books and elaborate calligraphy that took my breath away (and believe me they did), but the three essentials that Camphill is founded on.
Three Essentials
1—Recognition that in every human being lives an eternal healthy spirit no matter the disability.
2—Every human being has the right and responsibility to learn and develop.
The Dandelion's pallid Tube Astonishes the Grass - And Winter instantly becomes An infinite Alas –
The tube uplifts a signal Bud And then a shouting Flower -- The Proclamation of the Suns That sepulture is o'er -
Emily Dickinson, 1881
What if the dandelion heralded the same respect as the tulip or dahlia, commanded high prices, and could only be purchased at select nurseries? Would it be more highly regarded if it cost more, rather than arrived on lawns and byways for free? Every year, I am astonished by the number of people that vehemently detest the dandelion and seek to eradicate it by any means necessary.
Our lawn, shall we say, is ‘littered with” dandelions, plantain, violets of all types, and clover, just to name a few. Yet when we moved here 11 years ago, the lawn was a wasteland of pure grass, with nature’s bounty obliterated by the indiscriminate use of herbicides and pesticides. Slowly, we have cultivated a variegated spring crop of wildflowers and now watch the bees and other pollinators relish in them. We take cues from the bees, and happily gather the plants, adding them into our diet, since all four of the plants identified above are edible and provide nourishment.
One should not partake of dandelion wine or greens, make an infusion with the dainty violet flowers, add young plantain leaves to your spring salad or munch a ripe pink clover from the field, if herbicides or pesticides have been applied.
“Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.”
If one has any doubt about the effects of man and his man-made chemicals on the natural world, the New York Times recently published an analysis of a study done by the IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services; www.ipbes.net) that brings clear evidence to our dire situation:
Thoreau noted in his journal on May 9, 1858, “A dandelion perfectly gone to seed, a complete globe, a system in itself.” Why not, for the good of the globe, let those dandelions grow, feeding the pollinators and yourself, let it go to seed and then rejoice in what grows naturally around you?
——————————————————————————-
Emily Dicksinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), pgs. 577-78.
Summer promises the great outdoors: time to explore new terrains or become more familiar with the world found on your doorstep. As a primer to our summer exploration, we have been delving into ‘nature based’ reading.
on a colonial farm’s recommended summer reading list:
Carlos Magdalena, The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species, (New York: Doubleday, 2017), pg. 6.
“I want to make the world aware of what plants do for us. I want us to give plants a value and appreciate what they do. I want us to understand their importance for our survival and the survival of our families—our babies, grandparents, and future generations. I want us to realize that without them we would die, and most living things on land in the air would die with us. I want us to be enthused by the importance of conservation, to be fired with determination that we should never give up, even if there is only one plant left in the world. I want us to understand the importance of plants so much that we are moved to do something about it.”
Diana Beresford-Kroeger,The Global Forest 40 Ways Trees Can Save Us, (New York: Penguin Group, 2010), pg. 69.
“But art has a sister. The sibling is science. Art and science are of the same house, of the same family. Art in all its forms opens the way for science, because art is the precursor to science in all things. Art sounds the bell of change that leads to discovery, and science runs in to listen, to test, and to learn. Art sometimes molds and other times reflects the thoughts of culture and then defines the tides of fashion. Science follows in the wake of those tides and looks back at the great fetch of “why” to derive the question “how.”
“There is some time left. There is time for a different way of thinking in which man can rethread the needle and sew a life for the future. For if nature is destroyed, art will stand still and the creativity of science will follow suit. “
Tristan Gooley, The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs, (New York: The Experiment, 2010), pg 3.
“Picking up one simple scent can take the mind on an extraordinary journey. Sense and thought, observation and deduction, this two-step process is the key to transforming a walk from mind-numbing to synapse-tingling. One cannot work without the other; the brain can build wondrous edifices in our mind but it requires the scaffold that our senses provide.”
Richard Powers, The Overstory, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), pgs. 454-455.
‘ “Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics. Tagore said, Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven…..If we could see green, we’d see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get. If we could see what green was doing, we’d never be lonely or bored. If we could understand green, we’d learn how to grow all the food we need in layers three deep, on a third of the ground we need right now, with plants that protected one another from pests and stress. If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn’t have to chose between the Earth’s interests and ours. They’d be the same.” ‘
“People ask how can I as one person can make a difference……But if we can start making considered choices in our everyday actions, the little things – what we buy, what we wear, if we think carefully about the consequences of these choices – how it was made, where did it come from, was it child slave labor, was it cruelty to animals, etc., then we can start making different choices. Small choices. But multiply these small choices by a hundred, a thousand, a million and then a billion and then you start to see a different kind of world.” Jane Goodall.
I will be tucking wildflower, bird and trees guides into my bag this summer, along with newly handmade books to start mapping what I see, hear and smell around the farm. Delving deeper into where I live and what lives around me, guided by the thought that all is connected, and that by our choices we can make a difference.
[Note: Click on Author’s name for their website, including Carson, Jacobs, Goodall and Waters.]
We eagerly await the arrival of spring, more so this morning as snow flakes floated down to outline branches, leaves and stone walls as only newly fallen snow can do. We’ve had a few warm days sprinkled here and there in the past few weeks, but not enough to truly turn the corner and bring on full spring.
Saturday marks the start of the Spring Wildflower Festival at Bartholomew’s Cobble, as well as my third year as a wildflower guide there. On bitterly cold Saturdays in March, we guides gathered to discuss the geology of the site, the area’s ecology and the associated plant botany. We trudged through ice and snow over the trails, imagining the emergence of the green shoots and later lacy spring flowers. Bartholomew’s Cobble is a National Natural Landmark and we owe the rare diversity of the plant life to geological action that occurred 420 million years ago that results in both quartzite (acid) and marble (base) existing side by side–not a normal occurrence.
In preparation for my walks, I delve deeply into each plant’s characteristics, but I also search for the writings of others that found fleeting ephemerals.
Emily Dickinson, gardener and poet, reports of an 1848 spring walk to her friend Abiah Root:
“There were several pleasure parties of which I was a member, and in our rambles we found many and many beautiful children of Spring, which I will mention and see if you have found them — the trailing arbutus, adder’s tongue, yellow violets, liver leaf, bloodroot and many other small flowers.” 1
Mary Oliver recounts slipping away from school one spring day:
“I walked, all one spring day, upstream, sometimes in the midst of ripples, sometimes along the shore. My company were violets, Dutchman’s-breeches, spring beauties, trilliums, bloodroot, ferns rising so curled one could feel the upward push of the delicate hairs upon their bodies…The beech leaves were just slipping their copper coats; pale green and quivering they arrived into the year. My heart opened, and opened again. “2
On April 3, 1853 , Henry David Thoreau notices one of spring’s smallest flowers:
“To my great surprise the early saxifrage is in bloom. It was, as it were, by mere accident that I found it. I had not observed any particular forward news in it, when happening to look under a projecting rock in a little nook on the south side of a stump I spied one little plant which had opened three or four blossoms high up the cliff. Evidently you must look very sharp and faithfully to find the first flower. Such is the advantage of position.”
Bartholomew’s Cobble rightly boasts about its spring ephemerals and many noted and seen by Dickinson, Oliver and Thoreau—adder’s tongue, bloodroot, blue cohosh, Dutchman’s-breeches, fringed polygala, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, liver leaf, spring beauty, rue anemone, trillium, saxifrage, wild columbine, and violets are there, for example. Stop by on Saturdays and Sundays for guided tours, or ramble on the Ledges trail on your own with eyes wide open. As Oliver notes, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”4
1, Judith Farr, The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), pg.97.
2. Mary Oliver, Upstream, (New York: Penguin Press, 2016), pgs 4-5.
3. Geoff Wisner, Thoreau’s Wildflowers, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), pg. 16.
4.Oliver, pg. 8
Note: I will be leading tours on April 21 at 12pm, April 22 at 10pm and May 13th at 3pm. There are guided tours on Saturday and Sunday, 10am, 12pm, 2pm & 3pm. Bartholomew’s Cobble, 105 Weatougue Road, Ashley Falls, Sheffield, MA.
Second Note: A documentary about Emily Dickinson, Seeing New Englandly will be shown at the Roelieff Jansen Community Library on April 28 at 4pm, 9019 Route 22, Hillsdale, NY.
“As Carl Wilkens wrote when we make something with our hands, it changes the way we feel, which changes the way we think, which changes the way we act.” (1)
To make something whole. What does that mean exactly? Does that mean to construct an object from start to finish, as one would carve a bowl from a burl? Or perhaps, to take a discarded or broken item and make it anew, to renew it? To find food, an entire meal, from items deemed ‘weeds’?
As a way to transition into this new year, I set my mind to reading and listening to works by writers and makers. Terry Tempest Williams has been reading me her book on the sacred lands of our National Parks, The Hour of the Land. Many artists have been telling me their ‘making history’ via the Make/Time podcast series. And Adam Federman revealed the life of Patience Gray to me in his new biography, Fasting and Feasting.
Patience Gray, author of the legendary cookbook Honey from a Weed, lived what one could term a spare life, for she and her partner Norman Mommens chose to live “…for more than thirty years in a remote corner of southern Italy–without electricity, modern plumbing, or telephone.” (2) Yet, their lives were rich for the food she gathered and cooked, and for the sculptures he carved from marble, and for the landscape in which they situated themselves.
Gray was quite concerned with the dangers of “consumerland” and wrote about integrating life and art together in her columns for the Observer. In her 1960 article, “Crafts from Obscurity,” she noted, “Can you be touched by the delicate pinks, mauves, magentas, poppy tones in woven hangings without first having seen rock roses, wild mallows, oleander, or cornfields ablaze with poppy, in a landscape of scrub and stone?…Once the outside world has broken in with its promise of Lambrettas and refrigerators and hire-purchase, the self-sufficiency of a village culture is finished.”(3)
What would Gray say to our ‘interconnected world’? Would she relish in the internet and one’s ability to glean information in an instant? It seems rather unlikely, especially as she alludes to these types of modern burdens in an interview on the BBC:
“Life has become burdensome, in a way, in its demands on people. And I can lead them to a bit of daydreaming, which is rather out of fashion now, isn’t it? You could say that I have sort of responded against the present time where I feel that nothing is sacred. It’s a counterpoint to that. Because things are sacred. That’s what I feel.” (4)
Gray wanted her readers to not only daydream but to gather food and sustenance for the mind and soul. “Living in the wild, it has often seemed that we are living on the margins of literacy. This led to reading the landscape and learning from people, that is to first hand experience.” (5)
Each year, I attempt to delve deeper into the landscape directly outside of our front door, not only by observing the seasonal differences, but by also using what is directly at hand for food, healing and dyeing. Over the next months, chapter by chapter, Patience Gray will be my guide to not only the realm of daydreaming, but to the logistics of making whole through our environs.
Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of the Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks, (New York, Sarah Crichton Books, 2016), pg. 140 (1)
Adam Federman, Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray, (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017), Introduction(2), pg. 89 (3), pg. 304 (4.).
Patience Gray, Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, The Cycllades and Apulia, (New York: Harper and Row,1987), pg. 11. (5)